Nicolas Baier, who lives and works in Montréal, holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Concordia University. In 2003, he had a solo exhibition titled Scènes de genre at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Place Ville Marie, in 2012, he produced Autoportrait. The work, reproducing a meeting room in nickel, was installed under a glass cube on the esplanade of the tower designed by Ieoh Ming Pie. Baier’s works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Artwork description
It is a square-format digital print presenting the keys on a computer keyboard. The keys, worn and dirty from use, come from a number of keyboards of different colours and languages. To make this image, the artist scanned a large number of keyboards and digitally reassembled fragments of them. Although the keys that form the image are recognizable as keyboard keys, the overall composition borders on the abstract. Such tension between figuration and abstraction was quite common in Baier’s work at the time, as was the theme of the passage of time. Indeed, Chibouki brings to the forefront the effect of time and objects, and it speaks of daily life – particularly the artist’s daily life.